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John Carmack Is Interested In Wayland On Ubuntu

Phoronix: John Carmack Is Interested In Wayland On Ubuntu

John Carmack, the co-founder of id Software and lead developer of the Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake games, among others, is apparently interested in Wayland. Yes, actually the Wayland Display Server. He just used his Twitter account to share that he wishes he had the time to contribute to it and then linked to Mark Shuttleworth's blog post announcing Ubuntu will be switching to Wayland with their Unity desktop...

Please stop hyping stuff that is, at best, years away. You're jeopardizing your credibility by jumping on the Wayland bandwagon so vigorously. This is so similar to your stories (not articles) about Steam coming to Linux. You never even acknowledged Valve's announcement that Steam isn't being ported to the platform.

There's a disturbing tend that any time anyone even mentions Wayland, it gets a story. John Carmack said literally nothing about Wayland.

As anyone who follows opensource graphics driver development, it should be painfully obvious that development on things like this are very slow. Michael is acting like the messiah's triumphet return is nigh. What happens when there's constant, small improvements in Wayland? The hype can't sustain itself.

Wayland may turn out to be great; I'm suspicious, but it's certainly a possibility. However, there's no debate that it's years away from general use, so what's the use of reporting every time someone mentions it?

Games on Wayland are going to happen about as much/fast as games on X: not at all. Seriously, Linux is not a gaming platform.

Hype's not bad

Originally Posted by jbrown96

Michael,

Please stop hyping stuff that is, at best, years away. You're jeopardizing your credibility by jumping on the Wayland bandwagon so vigorously. This is so similar to your stories (not articles) about Steam coming to Linux. You never even acknowledged Valve's announcement that Steam isn't being ported to the platform.

There's a disturbing tend that any time anyone even mentions Wayland, it gets a story. John Carmack said literally nothing about Wayland.

As anyone who follows opensource graphics driver development, it should be painfully obvious that development on things like this are very slow. Michael is acting like the messiah's triumphet return is nigh. What happens when there's constant, small improvements in Wayland? The hype can't sustain itself.

Wayland may turn out to be great; I'm suspicious, but it's certainly a possibility. However, there's no debate that it's years away from general use, so what's the use of reporting every time someone mentions it?

Games on Wayland are going to happen about as much/fast as games on X: not at all. Seriously, Linux is not a gaming platform.

Hype is not bad I think, because this kind of new stuff needs to get known And it's also good to motivate people, if you say "I'ts years away but it may be good someday though I doubt" or something like that, you will make potential contributors go away, but if you say "It should solve a lot of problems, seems to be really good, everyone is talking about it, in 2 years it will be default",etc,etc then some people will believe it and maybe start testing it or just running the voice which will also atract new contributors.
So I think phoronix is doing the right thing saying this aloud, and also, it's the new stuff and it's exciting so it's interesting to read, I don't see any problem with publishing this.
PD:who talked about games? theres a lot of stuff not working right that may be fixed by wayland, like less bugs, less blinks, etc.

Maybe short stories like these should be put on twitter/identi.ca. Then people who want news now can find it there. Later on you can create a story on this site which sums up all the little stories with links to further information.

Maybe short stories like these should be put on twitter/identi.ca. Then people who want news now can find it there. Later on you can create a story on this site which sums up all the little stories with links to further information.

Games on Wayland are going to happen about as much/fast as games on X: not at all. Seriously, Linux is not a gaming platform.

OEM gaming platforms using the Linux kernel have never used X11. OEM computers with Linux/X11 have cheap integrated GPU's. MeeGo and Ubuntu will use Wayland when it has matured. Google's Android and Chrome OS use a custom display server. How many times have X11 updates broken proprietary drivers? Et cetera, etc., etc...

OEM gaming platforms using the Linux kernel have never used X11. OEM computers with Linux/X11 have cheap integrated GPU's. MeeGo and Ubuntu will use Wayland when it has matured. Google's Android and Chrome OS use a custom display server. How many times have X11 updates broken proprietary drivers? Et cetera, etc., etc...

Outlining the problems

Wayland is developed as a side project by a Red Hat developer. The problem with accepting this as a solution is that Red Hat needs to invest huge amounts of resources into the project. Definitely more people need to be active on its' development.

As a professional software developer my counterparts and I have to look ahead two years. I'm at times applaud that distributions devote so little to maintenance of their releases. This mess with upstream taking care of the problems leaves a potential customer looking ahead to new releases.

Debian Etch dropped support on 2010-02-15. So if your machine won't run squeeze then you are potential stuck on Etch with no support.

I am wondering, why does no one make use of the Linux Framebuffer?
Because it is too Linux specific?
It is such a great idea, you just write to a file and can draw things on your screen. A simple draw library, a simple window manager utilizing this, and voila!
And since it is a file, using it remotely is a matter of ease not comparable to any of these complicated protocols.